Cromlechs - homegrown Stonehenge of Ukraine

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Almost every person on the planet knows about the existence of Stonehenge - a grandiose ancient structure in England. But this is far from the only such object on the planet. And many thousand-year-old stone circles are well preserved in Ukraine on both banks of the Dnieper River.

The interfluve of the Dnieper and the Volga, the Northern Black Sea region is the cradle of many ancient civilizations, including the supposed ancestral home of Indo-European peoples. Therefore, it is not surprising that a huge number of archaeological monuments have survived in this region: from relatively recent Scythian burial mounds to very ancient cromlechs (stone circles) and menhirs (separate boundary and sacral steles).

Ukraine is especially rich in these structures. In the Dnieper region, you can find more than a dozen cromlechs, local Stonehenge. We are talking about both small stone circles, which served only to protect the mounds from creeping, and about huge and complex structures that clearly performed a sacred role - they were pagan sanctuaries and solar calendars.

Two of the largest in size cromlechs survived in the Dnepropetrovsk region, in the villages of Nikolskoe-on-Dnepr and Mirovoe, there are remains of a stone circle in the regional center itself. But in quantitative terms, the Zaporozhye region wins, where on the island of Khortytsya alone there are more than a dozen of such archaeological monuments.

On this legendary island, which has become the cradle of the Zaporozhye Cossacks, now there is even a special museum called the Scythian Stan, dedicated specifically to the megaliths of ancient eras. It contains objects of different centuries and millennia from all over the region - menhirs, cromlechs, stone women, Cossack elements of everyday life.

Separately, on Khortytsya, there is a huge cromlech, consisting of several stone circles at once. It is located on the northern edge of the island not far from the Zaporizhzhya Sich, reconstructed several years ago. The age of this structure, which scientists consider to be an ancient sanctuary of the Bronze Age, is more than four thousand years.

However, the cromlech in Nikolsky-on-Dnepr is even older. Academician Yavornitsky argued that this stone circle was built in the 3rd millennium BC, at a time when the creators of Stonehenge were not yet born.